57 Candidates and Nothing On

I was lucky to attend a debate among the candidates for Congress from Virginia’s Fifth District just before game 7 of the world series. This was the kind of event you can write about while drinking beer and yelling at a television with your family. In fact, I’m not sure there’s any other way you could write about it.

Here are our choices for the House of Misrepresentatives:

The incumbent Robert Hurt, a fairly typically horrendous Republican, if a bit less of a warmonger than his Democratic predecessor, didn’t make a fool of himself at all on Wednesday evening. On the contrary, he disgraced himself by not showing up. Of course, the debate was in the left-leaning corner of a district gerrymandered to keep him in Washington for life, barring a mass movement of a few thousand people for one of his opponents. He would have answered most of the evening’s questions as badly or worse than anyone else there, and that’s saying something. One of the questions, submitted by me on a 3×5 card, was this:

Roughly 53% of federal discretionary spending goes to militarism. How much should?

I doubt very much that Hurt would have answered the question clearly and directly had he been there.

Ken Hildebrandt, an Independent Green who spoke often if vaguely about cutting the military, answered my question by offering arguments that UFOs had visited Roswell. Asked about climate change, he argued that chem-trails from airplanes are manipulating our weather. Pretty much all the other questions he answered: “Hemp.” Hildebrandt is a bit of a mixed bag. He wants progressive taxation but no gun laws. He wants single-payer health coverage but calls it “public option” and claims that life expectancy in the United States is in the 40s. (During the whole debate, neither the moderator nor any candidate ever corrected another’s factual errors, and the opportunities were plentiful.) Hildebrandt wants to stop subsidizing Lockheed and Boeing, but has nothing to say on a lot of topics, seems to think the two men sitting next to him would be about as good in office as he would, runs for office every two years as a routine, has a wife running in the next district, and — less peacefully than one might wish — calls the incumbent a “monster.”

Behind Curtain 2 is Paul Jones, a Libertarian. He said he’d cut military spending in half immediately, that it’s not defensive. “Who’s going to attack us?” he asks. “It’s ludicrous! The reason they would attack us is that we’re over there all the time. . . . Nobody ever wins a war.” Not bad, huh? He wants to end the surveillance state too. Of course, you had to be there to hear him mumble it all. But here’s the downside. He wants that $500,000,000,000 to all go into tax cuts. He also objects to the term “discretionary spending.” It’s all discretionary, he says, no matter what some politician says (such as in a law putting Social Security out of his government-shrinking reach). Also he’d like to cut most of the rest of the government too, including eliminating a bunch of departments — although, unlike Rick Perry, he didn’t attempt to name any of them. He also wants to pay off the debt, use the free market for healthcare (while assisting the poor) and get immigrants to start paying taxes (huh?). He claims no laws can keep guns from criminals or the mentally ill. He claims that India produces more greenhouse gases than the United States.

Last up is Democrat Lawrence Gaughan. He was the most professional, articulate presence. He said he agreed with the other two gentlemen a lot, but it wasn’t clear what he meant. He said he agreed “100%” with Jones on military spending. So, does he want to cut it by 50% right away? Will he introduce a bill to do that? He criticized Hurt for supporting the new war in Iraq. He called the Pentagon a “Department of Offense.” But he said repeatedly that he would cut $1 trillion in military spending, which obviously meant $1 trillion over some number of years, probably at best 10 years, which would mean $100 billion a year. He claimed that the Democratic Party opposes war. And he claimed that his pro-war predecessor Tom Perriello is working with President Obama to reduce overseas bases. (All of this with a very straight face.)

That combination of comments makes Gaughan by far the best Democratic or Republican candidate in this district in living memory, but a bit of a question mark in terms of follow through. Hildebrandt said he wouldn’t have compromised on “public option.” Gaughan said that he both favored “public option” (clearly meaning to say “single payer”) and would have sought a “more bi-partisan solution.” Wow. Gaughan is not even in DC yet and he’s talking as if we’re bothered by “gridlock” more than bad healthcare. He wants to tax corporations and billionaires. He mentions “the 1%” a lot. But he favors a “leaner, more efficient government.” Hildebrandt mentioned publicly financed elections. Gaughan said he wanted to “get the money out of elections” without saying how. He wants immigrants to have a path to citizenship, and he wants to “tighten borders.” He sees the top problem as the concentration of wealth and power, but he sees the root cause of that as low voter turnout (what?). He’s for background checks on guns and recognizing the reality of climate change, but one doesn’t sense a major push for radical transformation. He talks about saving the climate by creating a better America, not a better planet.

Gaughan said he wasn’t taking money from the Democratic Party in Washington. That makes him different from Perriello, who proved very obedient to his “leaders.” No doubt the DCCC isn’t offering money because they don’t think any Democrat has a chance in VA-05. If we were to elect Gaughan, he might not lead Congress toward peace and justice, but he’d come a lot closer to actually meriting the praise that liberal groups gave Perriello, and he just might be answerable to the people who elected him rather than the party that didn’t buy his ticket to Washington. A liberal Democratic Party elections group, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, is basing its national elect-Democrats work out of Charlottesville, but none of the candidates they’re backing are from Virginia.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, economic, scientific, and educational issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: